The Sam Peckinpah Centenary 6 – Junior Bonner

“Somebody’s got to hold the horses”

Depending on your view, films set in and around the modern rodeo circuit are either a Western subgenre or are a subgenre of contemporary drama that happens to have real resonances with Westerns set in the 19^th century. It’s not a debate we propose to dig deeper into here but are happy, nevertheless, to add Sam Peckinpah’s entry into the rodeo filmography to our rolling coverage of his Westerns, marking his centenary year.

Interestingly enough, Junior Bonner is one of a crop of such films to have come out in the same year, 1972. Cliff Robertson kicked things off by starring and directing in J.W. Coop (apparently released on New Year’s Day), and later we got James Coburn in The Honkers and Richard Widmark in When the Legends Die. This writer has not caught the Coburn picture but can report, from memory, that the Robertson and the Widmark are both fine pieces, both, like Bonner, marked by the elegiac – not to say melancholic – colours with which they paint the lives and times of aging rodeo stars, lovable losers in the tradition of Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952). But both are outshone by Bonner, which starred Steve McQueen: not just the best rodeo picture of the year, but one that equals (and arguably surpasses) Ray’s excellent production.

In between the completion of our previously-chronicled and (mostly) uncharacteristically gentle Peckinpah pic, The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) and his moving on to Bonner, Sam had been busy shooting a movie that returned him to violence, and would return him to controversy and box office success. Straw Dogs (1971) was not a Western – it was set in contemporary Cornwall – though you can find some Western trappings in it (and not only because Cornwall is a rural area, once famed for its lawlessness, that sits at the far south-western tip of England). When it was released – after Bonner’s shooting had been completed – it brought Peckinpah back to media attention, with critics and audiences divided between those hailing it as a groundbreaking journey into the heart of human darkness and those considering it gratuitous, exploitative, and misogynistic. Well, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, they say.

But Bonner would see Sam see-saw back not just to the American West (the film was set and filmed in Prescott, Arizona, in and after its Rodeo week in July 1971) but also to the quieter, more lyrical textures of Cable Hogue. As much through character and ambience as through plot, Peckinpah tells the tale of McQueen’s Bonner, a rodeo star painfully aware of his middling age, and of his sometimes-troubled relationships with family members, associates, and a rapidly changing West and world.

There is a detailed first-hand account in existence of the pre-production and production of Junior Bonner, in the form of a 2018 memoir authored by its screenwriter, the late Jeb Rosebrook, with assistance from his son Stuart. If you’re a fan of the movie or any of its key personnel, this volume is worth tracking down, both for its generous selection of photos, many unavailable elsewhere, and for Rosebrook’s well-written recollections. The account below draws heavily from these, as well as various internet sources.

Rosebrook on the Bonner set

An important context is that like, say, Ride the High Country, but unlike, for instance, The Wild Bunch, this was a project initiated by others and well into early development before Sam got attached to the property. In fact, it started with Rosebrook, a struggling novelist and screenwriter – who had incidentally served Western duties by scripting an episode of The Virginian, and who aged nine had been sent to an Arizona boarding-school-cum-ranch – attending the Prescott rodeo. It inspired him to consider an original screenplay with which he struggled until his agent called out of the blue to say that Robert Redford was looking for a rodeo project to star in, kick-starting Rosebrook into swiftly penning the first treatment for what eventually became Junior Bonner. Although Redford disappears from our story at this point, weeks later the agent got the treatment to producer Joe Wizan who was willing to take enough of a punt on Bonner to pay the writer to prepare a full first-draft script.

According to Rosebrook, Wizan (to the writer’s scepticism) stated from day one that he envisaged McQueen in the lead. As the script reached decent shape, Rosebrook was surprised to have his scepticism confounded by an invitation with almost no notice to join Wizan at McQueen’s house; he was then elated when McQueen liked the script. (Rosebrook later discovered that Wizan was privately aware that McQueen, one of Hollywood’s very biggest stars, was going through a financial and personal rough patch, making this relatively small-scale picture more attractive than it might have been.)

McQueen soon signed and then Wizan rapidly found the ideal director: a gentleman named Sam Peckinpah, barely off the plane from England but extremely keen to take up the opportunity to explore his end-of-the-West themes in a contemporary setting. Things then moved fast. Necessarily so, as everyone’s mind was concentrated by an immoveable deadline: the need to film during Rodeo Week in Prescott, which of course had a fixed date, commencing with its July 4 parade.

In the mere five weeks before then, a ton of things had to get done. The quickly-assembled cast included the versatile Robert Preston, playing Junior’s wayward father and faded rodeo legend Ace Bonner; the English-born and supremely talented actress (and pioneering woman director) Ida Lupino as Ace’s estranged wife and Junior’s mother; and, Peckinpah ‘stock company’ members Ben Johnson (himself a former rodeo rider) and Dub Taylor.

Interestingly, Lupino was second choice after Susan Hayward, who’d been female lead in The Lusty Men, but who flounced off before signing. Back in 1957, Ms Lupino had hired a young Mr Peckinpah to work on her TV show Mr Adams and Eve.

Roughly in parallel with this, major script revisions were being done, with massive input from Peckinpah. Revisions continued throughout shooting. It was Sam’s idea to start the film with the tense flashback to Junior being thrown off the bull which he must ride again in a climactic scene; his idea as well to throw a mammoth bar fight into the middle of the movie so as to leaven a potentially languid audience experience with some lively humour and a bit of action.

Finally the unit descended on Prescott a week before 4^th July for intensive cast rehearsals, which further refined the dialogue. The first two shooting days were devoted to the two big set-pieces: first at the parade, filmed from different vantage points by no fewer than five cameras, then the next day at the rodeo itself. The crew would return to the rodeo grounds several times for further shots and scenes over the remaining weeks, otherwise mostly devoted to recording more intimate, dialogue-based scenes.

Rosebrook mentions various tensions and hi-jinks, both on-set and after dark, and occasional egotism and star behaviour from McQueen (while proving no match for the no-nonsense Lupino). But the actor approached the acting thoughtfully and did much of his own stunt work.

McQueen performing his own stunt work

And no Sam shoot could be complete without its share of directorial volatility and power-play (including characteristically intemperate firings of various unfortunate underlings). But overall it seems to have been a relatively harmonious shoot. Sam even stayed reasonably sober… that is, by Sam standards. Much the most disturbing touches in Rosebrook’s portrait of Peckinpah are of his relationships with women which, it’s more than hinted, could turn occasionally violent.

The bar scene took a week to film; Sam made sure – as no other director would – that there was real beer in the glasses. Locations for later scenes were scouted even while earlier ones were being shot. Many Prescott locals were given small speaking parts on the spot. Dialogue and bits of business were often added or changed not long before shooting. Perhaps the rather on-the-fly nature of the process contributed to how authentic the finished product feels.

In the cutting room, many of the quieter scenes would be left to play in long takes though the actual rodeo scenes are often excitingly quickly-edited. The opening scene also used then-fashionable split-screen, which worked rather well, and Sam decided to end the closing one on a freeze-frame, which worked even better.

Critics were very divided but audiences unfortunately less so: Junior Bonner was a box office dud, losing $2,820,000 altogether. The common diagnosis of its poor performance was that moviegoers expected an alpha-male action movie out of McQueen and weren’t really ready for getting instead an atmospheric depiction of an underdog chasing fading dreams in an increasingly alien modern West. Peckinpah and McQueen soon reunited for The Getaway (1972), a heist movie – with some Western trappings – that gave punters the exciting gunplay, fast pace, and cool charisma they wanted from McQueen, bringing both director and star back to box-office glory.

But despite its initially underwhelming impact, over the years many Sam-fans have taken Junior Bonner to their hearts, considering it an underrated gem – a lovable loser of a movie.

Jeff’s Take

The movie is slow, gentle…There are old West moments such as a saloon brawl, and the rodeo scenes are real as hell. The film seems at times a documentary about the 84th Prescott Frontier Days yet it is far more… It is a touching family drama and tells of the passing of the old times.

RR’s Take

If memory serves, this was the first Peckinpah film I ever saw. I think I’ve seen it twice since – the second of these for purposes of this webpage (the copy consulted, which looks to be the best quality, currently affordable Region 2 release, is a Spanish blu-ray of solid rather than stunning quality). And every single time, I loved it. I’d go so far as to say it’s my second favourite Peckinpah after Major Dundee. But while it’s infinitely less flawed, I also find there’s much less to say about it other than that everything in it just works – beautifully.

There’s an almost documentary quality to the lengthy parade sequence and the rodeo itself. As a limey with no connection to that part of the USA or to rodeo culture, I found it absorbing to briefly inhabit that world.

From a more conventional movie point of view, the exquisite performances by everyone– especially Preston, and even more so Lupino (she is fantastic) – make this essentially human drama really sing. And the drama sits inside the atmosphere so effectively generated by Peckinpah’s staging and pacing and Lucien Ballard’s typically excellent location photography. They evoke not only the south-western milieu but also an inescapable yet subtle sadness: the melancholy of lives aging, chances shrinking, the world turning… classic Peckinpah themes but this time delivered without a shot being fired.

It’s fascinating to see some of Sam’s favourite attention-grabbing techniques used so much more gently than usual. The violence is kept to a single punch through the window (which has real impact coming so suddenly and forcefully) and that gloriously goofy bar-room brawl (which makes us think of John Ford). And Sam’s beloved slow-motion is used, for once and rather gorgeously, in a non-violent way during the scenes in which McQueen and Preston, on horseback, escape for a few minutes from the rowdy Main Street parade into their own little backyards and railway depot dreamworld: it’s my favourite bit of the film.

Though many may consider this ‘minor’ Peckinpah – low-key compared to the bigger, bolder, better-known movies – Junior Bonner is probably the only one that, on its own terms and in its own way, is, for me, pretty much perfect.

Bud’s Take

With The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Sam Peckinpah started to loosen the shackles of his ‘Bloody Sam’ persona. Their grip tightened, perhaps tighter than ever before, with Straw Dogs and that film’s harrowing depiction of both physical and sexual violence. But with Junior Bonner, Peckinpah shed those shackles, at least for a short time.

Since Bonner is a Peckinpah picture, one can be forgiven for immediately perceiving it as (yet) another paean to a vanishing West. But such perceptions are in the eyes of the beholder; to this particular beholder, Bonner’s world is one where the West has already vanished: its timeworn wooden buildings bulldozed, its rocky crags leveled, all for the placement of mobile homes (“the thing of the future!”)

Not that all of the director’s themes are absent. His (cinematic) dislike of modern technology is on vivid display as, early in the film, Junior drives to an abandoned, ramshackle home. Noise and dust fill the background as heavy equipment clears nearby land. The house and land, we later learn, belonged to his father.

Exhibiting that vaunted McQueen cool, Junior in his battered Cadillac and horse trailer face off against a track loader. The machine’s uplifted bucket brims with rubble; its implacable driver is barely visible behind dusty windshield and mirrored sunglasses.

Ballard frames the earth mover as a huffing, puffing mechanical monster slavering rocks and debris while towering over the lone person in its path: a powerful image, even if Bonner ultimately backs away.

But… the film IS a paean, or perhaps a valentine, to Westerners of a certain sort, the individuals who refuse to be conventional, who don’t seem to care about putting down roots, who want to roam the wide open spaces that only the American West provides. Junior Bonner is a story of two such persons, Junior and Ace, as well as the people who love and care for them, in spite of their restlessness.

Their story is embodied by a fantastic cast. In his take, RR mentions the high quality of the acting; he and I are in complete agreement.

In a role that Ben Johnson was born to play, he is reliably excellent as an ex-rodeo cowboy, now a rodeo promoter. His character is one of several who offers Junior a chance to move on from the wandering life of rodeo competitor.

Joe Don sneering

The picture is one of Joe Don Baker’s earliest movie roles. The always interesting character actor apparently disliked Peckinpah, but did not allow personal feelings to hamper his performance. Baker gives a good account (and flashes his Elvis-esque sneer) as Junior’s decidedly unsentimental brother Curly, the aspiring mobile home mogul and face of upward mobility in the film.

Barbara Leigh’s Charmagne has the thankless task of playing an underwritten part: she has little to do except catch the eye of and provide a dalliance for Junior. She does both well enough. In the end, however, no character can conquer the Bonner wanderlust.

Leigh, McQueen, and Peckinpah

Junior Bonner provides yet another opportunity to express appreciation for the director’s way with veteran actors. Like William Holden, Joel McCrea, and Randolph Scott from earlier Peckinpah films, Ida Lupino and Robert Preston were long-time screen stalwarts; all five received top billing in movies made before Sam reached the age of majority. And all five, as well as late-to-acting Robert Ryan, reached zeniths in the autumn of their careers under Peckinpah.

Of the two old pros, the florid Preston has more screen time and the showier role. Although Ace is basically a womanizing cad with a preposterous dream, he is a likable cad in Preston’s hands. And Preston and McQueen play off each other well.

Lupino does more with less. Fewer scenes, fewer lines, but she conveys so much without a word: a small gesture, a shift in positioning, and, critically, a look in those expressive eyes. Side note: the pictures in this post sadly do no justice to the luminous Lupino. But, echoing my trail partner’s assessment, the actress gives a fantastic performance.

Steve McQueen must have pondered just how Preston and Lupino managed to steal the movie from him.

Although my pecking order of Peckinpah films differs from that of RR, I too place Junior Bonner as my second favorite among the director’s films. After several viewings of this thoughtful character study, and even while really enjoying its immediate successor, The Getaway, I wish that Sam had more opportunity to make films like it.

Alas, the marketplace demanded Bloody Sam.

‘Sam Peckinpah’ on Facebook As mentioned previously, this Facebook page is an excellent source of information and images on Peckinpah and his films; several images in this post are gratefully sourced from the page.